Marx and Eliot and the Amish

"Emily, would you be Amish if you could?" one of my students asked me. It was because I brought whoopie pies for class (Graham: "If you're going to bring them food, try to make sure it's around the time you hand out class evaluations."). I had to pause and think. But the answer is clearly no: I like make-up too much.

And then, at the end of class, when chatting with two girls who brought cookies to class: "No, I don't want the cookies, why don't you take them, Emily?"

Me: "I don't want them. Why don't you just throw them away?"

The girls: "No! What would Karl Marx say!"

As if Karl Marx (who we'd been discussing in class) had a policy about wasting food! But I took them home, anyway.

I paired Eliot with Marx for this class, mostly because I had to squeeze Eliot in before the end of the term.

From The Waste Land

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!

'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,

'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

From "Little Gidding"

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

The first session didn't really get the poems, but the second one certainly did. I let all of my Christian biases out in this class. I just got sick of pretending I didn't have them. And it is too hard to talk about Eliot without them. I talked about St. John of the Cross and how he influenced me and so I made him my confirmation saint (One girl: "Did you convert because you got engaged? Are you engaged?" [Myrrh--she was not very good at checking fingers!] Another girl: "No! She converted because she was influenced!"). I talked about the transcendent intersecting time as an alternative to Marx and the modern alienation that he diagnoses. There you have it.